What’s a secret strategy to drive traffic to online marketplace items?

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Traffic strategies are more like open secrets. Most people who are interested in running an eCommerce site already know what to do, or they could figure it out if they really sat down and studied the competition. They just haven’t figured out every literal step for their exact situation. There are multiple strategies to drive traffic to any webpage, and eCommerce product pages are no different. Picking the best strategy for you specifically is no doubt a difficult task. But I am here to help.

Let’s quickly discuss a few strategies to drive traffic to your online marketplace items.

Rest assured, you are not alone in trying to find an easy/simple way to get more traffic. The problem is that easy, simple, small, etc. are all subjective words. Before I proceed further, I would like to make it clear, traffic never grows overnight. It takes time, provided you aim to keep it for the long term. Since you are looking for a small secret strategy, I would suggest four strategies in brief that provide fairly quick returns if you commit:

#1 By performing SEO measures on your marketplace website: I’ve been getting more into SEO lately, because for those who truly understand the inner workings, and not just the theory of it, SEO optimization combined with content marketing really is an unfair advantage. Doing this regularly can get you more organic traffic, especially compared to the amount of effort involved. No doubt it takes some time to build, but it offers long term benefits that do not need to be maintained. Once you’ve found the best way to rank your site, it will rank, and it’ll stay ranked for quite a while, possibly forever, and even if it doesn’t, it’s often not that hard to beat the competition again. SEO measures include keyword research for writing web content, in your case, product descriptions, meta titles, general descriptions, etc. But there’s much more than that. SEO is a broad topic that requires a separate discussion. I can help you with that if you want.

#2 By blogging: The simplest possible form of scheduled content marketing. What you do is maintain an active blog for your website and display it on the main navigation. It is a common trick that most online stores implement. Add content regularly on your blog describing your products, their honest reviews, etc. Whatever is appropriate and valuable to your target audience.

#3 By offering discounts, special offers, referral bonuses, etc. That’s self explanatory. By offering discounts and referral bonuses to your existing customers, your marketplace will be promoted through word of mouth publicity.

#4 By having a strong social media presence: Social media websites are a reliable source for driving traffic to any website. The challenge is to identify the target audience first, then reaching out to them with valuable, shareable posts, videos, etc. If your budget allows, you can also opt for advertising on social media websites. Advertising on social media is flexible, as it offers many features such as daily spending limits, lookalike audiences, and retargeting.

By doing more research on the above strategies specific to your marketplace and products, and then implementing some of the things I put above, ideally all of them, you can drive more traffic to your site in the coming months.

Now, if you want a flashy piece of advice, let’s unveil what I think is the true secret of driving more traffic: picking the best strategy for both your site and yourself. I have a particular way of picking and implementing traffic strategies. I know lots of things could work, but what matters is that it works for me, my time, what I like to do, etc. I don’t care how effective anything is if I don’t like to do it.

Coming straight to the point, while picking a strategy for traffic, you have to decide what kind of traffic is required by your website/online marketplace, as well as what gels with your style and needs. Always consider the following three things:

1. Cheap/Free: That’s pretty self-explanatory. Is this traffic method or tactic free, or nearly free?

2. Fast: Right after you do the work involved, does the traffic from this method come to the website? Or do you have to wait?

3. Consistent: Does the traffic from this method continue to trickle in, indefinitely? Or is it a one-off burst that stops when you stop?

Why am I talking about this? Simple: it is not possible to get all three things from a single traffic strategy. You will have to compromise at least one. Pick two, leave one.

Based on that, there are three main ways to drive traffic that work the best, depending on the above factors:

1) Networking (Cheap+Fast)

2) Link Building (Cheap+Consistent)

3) Paid Advertising (Fast+Consistent)

I’d go into more detail about each of these and how to do them right, but this answer is long enough. If you are interested, I have made a complete article that covers more details: Hunt Down The Three Little Pigs of Online Traffic. For more actionable tips on driving online traffic, you can explore the Knowledge Base section on my website as well.

To sum up, you can easily drive more traffic to your online marketplace items, provided you follow the suggestions of this answer in the right manner.

Please feel free to reply if you have any questions.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo


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